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“I’m not [going],” said Blunt of tonight’s meeting, offering no explanation for the no-show. “I haven’t talked to the president. I did talk to some people over the weekend. I talked to someone from the White House. I’m always glad to talk to him… Part of being the leader is trying to figure out what you can work for that’s possible. And it’s not just trying to persuade everybody on the other side that they need to agree with you.

“So if the president is looking for the possible I hope he finds it.”

As news of the Senate confab leaked, so did reports that Obama intends to take a stroll into the lion’s den in about week, with visits to the House Republican and Senate Republican weekly meetings on the Hill — more public and presumably less friendly get-togethers.

“I saw he had some slippage in his poll numbers this week, and every White House watches that closely,” says Republican strategist John Murray, a former top aide to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) who ran a super PAC last year that campaigned against Obama and Democrats.

“Up ‘til now his message to us has been ‘Here are the conditions of your surrender,” that’s not working for him,” Murray added. “The problem with the permanent campaign strategy is that you are only ginning public adoration from the people who already voted for you. It’s not really persuading anybody. Now it’s time to convince other people, the people across the aisle, that you are willing to have a dialogue.”

The new bipartisan push, while not unexpected, comes amid a pair of polls in the last week by Reuters/Ipsos and Gallup showing Obama’s approval rating plummeting by seven points from the low 50s to the mid-40s.

Equal numbers of respondents in the Reuters survey blamed Obama and Congress for the sequester stalemate which has triggered $84 billion in automatic spending cuts, a dangerous trend for the West Wing.

Senate GOP staffers have long griped that the White House contempt for their bosses has filtered down in ways profound and petty, from the lack of consultation on big bills to small stuff, like sending personal notes from senior White House by mail, where they are often lost in a pile, instead of by special courier.

That Obama is starting with the Senate isn’t surprising: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said he won’t be dragged into another fruitless negotiating marathon with Obama — and many mainstream Senate Democrats have expressed a greater desire to cut a long-term bipartisan deal to shed the GOP’s “Party of No” label.

Several Senate Republicans contacted by POLITICO were amused by the timing of the meeting, which exemplified, in their view, Obama’s indifferent efforts at outreach: It required them to trudge through predictions of the worst DC blizzard in two years, and was “subject to postponement if the weather deteriorates,” according to the press advisory.